Introducing: Me

Hello!

Welcome to my first blog post. To start things off, I wanted to introduce myself and the work that I do. My journey into the arts industry started in school as a student of theatre arts at Ecclesbourne School. During that course, I went on a final year trip to Punchdrunk's The Drowned Man. When watching this show I was amazed by the detail used in creating such a unique and intricate world. The ability to walk around sprawling sets, follow storylines that caught your attention or just simply absorb the environmental storytelling reminded me so much of the vast Roleplaying video games I have sunk so much time into. From this performance I knew I one day wanted to create my own version of that immersion, something that would cause that same reluctance to leave I felt that night.

After this time at school I then enrolled in the Theatre Arts course at University of Derby focusing on wider stagecraft of writing, acting and technical theatre. As part of this course I was a part of a series of productions including The Tempest, Marat/Sade, and The Hour we knew nothing of each other. With these productions I also started to create my final dissertation project which was analysis of the immersive industry as a whole, with a comparison towards the contemporary theatre industry. Whilst writing that thesis I found the theories of Dr. Josephine Machon on the different forms of immersive experience and how these can be achieved.

With my final undergraduate work complete, I then began work with my own theatre company Smoking Guns Theatre, a collective of local university graduates working on our first production One Night of Dread. The intention of One Night of Dread was to create an experimental piece of immersive Game Theatre using the RPG setting Dread.

'The show is a collaborative storytelling adventure where crucial decisions are made by the

audience, controlling what happens next. Each story is influenced by classic horror and

thriller genres, and is chosen by the audience through the rolling of a dice. Each side of the

dice represents a different world inhabited by a different monster that will try to stop our

protagonists from making it to the end of the night. From that moment on, the journey and

fate of the narrative rests in the hands of the audience.'

This system allowed us to create nonlinear narratives based around classic horror tropes whilst utilizing an improvised digital soundscape that was affected by the participants actions. The basis was to test Machon's theory of 'Stages of Immersion'. The piece used a large block tower which audiences would pull blocks from to produce a tower of terror, a physical representation of the building tension of the story. One Night of Dread was toured through the midlands thanks to a successful ACE application and was awarded Weekend highlight by De Montfort University during Leicester Comedy Festival.

Throughout this time I also worked as an Artist for The Mighty Creatives' Emerge Festival in Sandwell/Dudley which involved a year-long session of workshops focused around devising a community festival with two community bodies around the themes in Shakespeare's work. This project helped me develop my skills as a project assistant, learning how to create event management documents such as risk assessments, contracting, and working to facilitate meeting with multiple governing bodies. It is this work that showed me the importance of producers within the arts industry and has led me to want to bring more of this into my own practice.

Which brings us to the future.

During the pandemic I was hit hard as so many in our industry were, and was able to take this time to look at my own practice. Having come into the industry to create new and experimental theatre that hopes to immerse I had made little progress on my own skillset. If I wanted to move forward I had to look further afield into the immersive industry blossoming through initiatives like StoryFutures and the work of companies like LIVR to bring theatre, both digital and conventional to a wider audience. During that time I also took on the opportunity to be an associate artist with a fantastic Midlands theatre company Chronic Insanity. They are a great company working to bring new and experimental ways of working to a larger audience both digital and in-person. Within this role I have already performed in one piece named Means of Production all created during lockdown, and I am currently writing for a second piece. I have also started work on teaching myself software capable of easily making branching narratives like Twine in the hope of advancing my toolset to bring to storytelling in the next year.

I intend for this blog to be a collection of thoughts and ideas as I go through this process, along with a place to discuss the great work being made in the theatre an experiential industry right now.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope you will find the future posts helpful.

~Harry.

#Introducing #Dread #Emerge